IBM launches cyber security centre for India

The new centre can offer tailor-made solutions for clients, provide alerts and advisories based on global events, 24x7 emergency response services for security breaches, and services to manage the security of devices being used by employees.Sujit John | TNN | December 14, 2016, 11:48 IST

Highlights

The average organizational cost of data breach is currently Rs 9.73 crore, up from Rs 6.04 crore in 2013,

There is a 31% likelihood that Indian organizations would experience a data breach of 10,000 or more records over a period of two years, and that malicious or criminal attacks have become the most common root cause for data breach in Indi,

BENGALURU: IBM has launched what it says is a state-of-art cyber security command centre in Bengaluru to offer customized security solutions to its Indian clients.The company says it planned this long before the extra push for digital in India came from demonetization. But the current environment makes the move look particularly relevant. Concerns about security are becoming top-of-mind for many involved as the Modi government aggressively pushes digital payments.

Sandeep Sinha Roy, head of security services in IBM India, indicated that those concerns are not misplaced. “We deal with an average of 140 million incidents in India a month,” he said. Incidents can involve inadvertent or malicious acts by internal employees of companies, or external threats.

The new centre can offer tailor-made solutions for clients, provide alerts and advisories based on global events, 24x7 emergency response services for security breaches, and services to manage the security of devices being used by employees. It can ensure that data resides within the country and never leaves, a compliance requirement that some enterprises in India need to follow. IBM will bring the power of its Watson cognitive computing system also to the space, enabling it to provide a whole new level of analytics and instant response.

Mathew Newfield, director of managed security services in IBM, said Watson is being beta tested with 40 global clients. “We’ll start training Watson in the Indian environment shortly,” he said. Systems like Aadhaar and UPI (unified payment interface) make the Indian environment different from others.

Newfield said Watson can do in seconds what a security engineer will take hours to do. “If there are 100,000 devices in an organization’s infrastructure, Watson can look at all the ongoing, real-time threats, and instantaneously understand which of those devices are susceptible to the attacks. If there’s a big security event globally, Watson can figure out quickly which clients in India have a profile that make them susceptible,” he said.

Roy said the financial sector in India, especially banks, has been very serious about security, and has become more so with the recent push towards digital. “These (digital security solutions) are the guards of the future, not the security guard at the bank branch,” he said. He declined to name the banks because of non-disclosure agreements, but said 18 customers, including Dewan Housing Finance and Aditya Birla Nuvo, are being serviced by the new centre.

In November, IBM Security announced a major expansion of its incident response capabilities, including new facilities, services and software as part of a $200 million investment made this year. Apart from local centres like the new one in India, IBM also has ten global security service centres, including one in Bengaluru, that have recently been rebranded as X-Force Command Centres. These centres work as a single entity to service clients globally.

Earlier this year, rival Accenture launched a global flagship “Cyber Fusion Centre” in Bengaluru that leverages the company’s inter-disciplinary capabilities and combines everything related to cyber security – from strategy, innovation and consulting to implementation and trouble-shooting incidents – under one roof.